PITTSFIELD, Mass. – Pittsfield Girls Softball will celebrate the start of its season on Saturday morning with plans to make the year more competitive than ever.

 

The 10 a.m. 11 a.m. ceremony at Doyle Field will usher in a season that will see Pittsfield teams playing an integrated schedule with programs based in South County, Dalton and Adams.

 

“We’re not consolidating,” PGS President Steve Alger said last month. “We’re not merging. We’re going to play some games together this year and see how it goes.”

 

Aligning the leagues required some details to be addressed, like the fact that the Lee/Great Barrington/Sheffield league divides players by grade while PIttsfield classifies players by age, Alger explained.

 

But it is not a new idea to have youth softball teams from different parts of the county play one another on a regular basis.

 

“We’ve all been thinking about it and talking about it,” Alger said. “It all came together when some of our girls were at The Infield and some of the Lee girls were there at the same time.”

 

The encounter at the Pittsfield sports training facility allowed league officials to turn concepts into reality.

 

“We said, let’s get our boards together,” Alger said. “Myself and Brian MacDonald went down to Lee, and we came to an agreement that this is something we want to happen. They, in turn, went to the other towns in their league.”

 

The leagues were still hammering out the integrated schedule in early April when Alger discussed the plan. But he said it could include some sort of post-season to crown a county youth softball champion.

 

“This is an idea that’s been kicking around for up to a decade at least,” Alger said. “Back then, numbers weren’t as pressing an issue.”

 

Now, those numbers have declined for many youth sports leagues, and local softball leagues are no exception. Alger said that with about 100 girls expected in the Pittsfield program, the league is maintaining what it had in 2025.

 

But those numbers have dropped off since the levels seen before the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

“We’re lucky if we’re half of what we were [in 2019],” Alger said. “There are so many different opportunities for girls now. Parents found other things for them to do indoors during COVID. A lot of them decided that’s a path they want to stay on.

 

“Frankly, we’re losing as many girls to dance as we are to soccer.”

Playing games against teams from other leagues will give players in all the leagues more variety.

 

And the Pittsfield league is taking another step this spring to make those games as competitive as possible.

 

“In the past, we kept our [Berkshire Force travel] teams together as a team and threw them into league play,” Alger said. “What we’re doing this year is spread them out evenly over the teams and try to level off the level of play a little bit.

 

“Hopefully, that works out. But we’re doing a lot of this for the first time. We’ll try it and see if it works. Whatever adjustments we have to make, we’ll make.”

 

Another change for the PSG program this spring: weekend games.

 

“Adams had requested it and Canaan [Conn.] requested it,” Alger said. “If they’re going to make a drive, they would prefer to do that on a Saturday morning rather than a Wednesday night, especially for the little kids.

 

“When Adams plays Canaan, they’ll probably play in Pittsfield – split the difference. We’ll act as the hub in this whole thing. We have five fields, and I think every other group has one.”

 

It is not the first time the Pittsfield youth softball league has scheduled games against other leagues, Alger said. It has played games with Dalton, Adams and North Adams at different times over the years.

 

This year’s county-wide approach is geared toward growing the sport and improving the experience for the girls already playing.

 

“The one thing all the teams have in common is we have a real commitment to getting girls on the field, whatever it takes,” Alger said. “If we have to play by a different set of rules, we’ll give it a shot. If that means the age groups are different, we’ll try it.

 

“Getting girls in the game is all our shared goal.”